My advice is avoid hosting companies like the plague, they're all rotten to the best of my knowledge. Even if they don't steal your miners, they'll rip you off one way or another. The last time I hosted miners, I bought $100k+ worth. At the end of the term I asked for miners to be sent to me, which they refused and said they would have to be sold on my behalf. They then strung me along for over 6 months following end of contract, giving excuse after excuse, where one excuse contradicted the last etc. They said there was no market for the miners, nobody interested etc before finally sending the sale proceeds. Allegedly they sold the miners for $500 each. At the end of the contract, these miners were moving for over $2k a piece second hand, and selling like hotcakes. Whilst I can't prove it, I'm pretty certain these miners were left running during this time, accumulating profit for the hosting company and nothing for me.
This particular hosting company is called WATTUM.IO, and they're meant to be one of the better ones
Every person I know that has hosted miners somewhere has a similar tale to tell, OR much worse in most cases (including outright theft of the equipment).
If you aren't in the position to host your own miners on free (or extremely cheap power), invest in BTC and HODL instead.
That's a perfect explanation of how things usually end with hosting, if you read 10 hosting stories, it's safe to assume that 9 of them will have a sad ending, this is mainly due to a conflict of interest between the host and the client, hosting companies (similar to cloud mining) can be decent when mining profitability is but bad when it's great -- they show their true color.
You buy a miner for $3000, it makes you $20 in profit, you pay them $10 for hosting fees, you net $10, they make say $1 a day, you are taking a great risk, need 300 days to reach ROI, they make a small but predicted and guaranteed income, so everything is good.
A few months later, BTC does 5x, your miner now makes $200, you are still going to pay them only $10 and they are still going to net only $1, that's when they start envying you, they would be like "he is making $190 profit a day, we are making a tiny $1, we must figure something out to take some of that $190"
And then starts all the excuses of "power rate has gone up due to high gas prices", or " we would now charge you x amount of money for maintenance", and you can guess all the excuses they can come up with.
Since electricity is the backbone of BTC mining, hosting is like sending your cow to some farmer who would milk it, sell the milk, send you the money, and take a portion of it, when the milk price is too high, that person will think that you don't deserve all the profit since he is the one doing the work, so it's either he sends your cow back, or figure out means to steal it.
As for forcing you to sell your gears, Compass Mining did something
similar before.
I can also share a similar story that happened to me personally, I hosted gears with a guy who wanted a % of the income and didn't charge per kWh (it was during a bull market), everything ran smoothly for a while, and then in the worst moment of the bear market he wanted to change the terms, he reasoned that the % I was paying him is not even enough for the power cost and that it was way below average which was true despite the cheap power rate he had, but in the previous months I was overpaying since the % I gave him was a lot higher than the power bill or whatever everyone else was charging, I had to agree to his terms because moving the gears elsewhere was not easy as he was located very far from where I live and because I knew he would not just shut them down, pack them and send them, he would probably waste my time with excuses till he exhausts my gears.
Being in the mining business for so many years now, having run my own farms, managed other larger farms, and traded new and used gears, I can tell you that the quote below is perfectly accurate and will hold forever.
If you aren't in the position to host your own miners on free (or extremely cheap power), invest in BTC and HODL instead.
